After making their way out of the airport and into a mini-bus taxi, Lord Balah and the Witches soon found themselves in the heart of the city of Johannesburg: in the place they call Hillbrow. Convinced that accommodation in the area would be cheap, Trudie had persuaded Lord Balah that it was in their best interest to find somewhere to sleep before the sun went down. Johannesburg at night, they all knew (except for the twins, who at this point were quite oblivious to the dangerousness of their now unfamiliar surroundings) was no place for innocent souls like themselves to be.
Without hesitation Lord Balah and the Witches found a small room in a cheap, ramshackled hotel. Unfortunately, their room only had one bed, and so it was decided that the twins and Trudie would sleep head-to-toe whilst Lord Balah slept at the door in order to provide protection against possible (and probable) intruders.
As they began unpacking their things, Trudie noticed a set of papers the twins were staring at with what seemed like an unnatural amount of concentration. Stepping forward to read what was written on them, Trudie saw with horror that it was a marriage certificate. Speaking in unison (in Chinese, so that neither Trudie nor Lord Balah could understand what they were saying), the twins explained how in order to escape their homeland they had married a South-African man via the internet, and that it was he who had organized their untimely illegal escape. Of course, their story went un-understood amongst their half-sister and Lord Balah, who stood perplexed and disorientated as the twins jumped around enthusiastically and with great expression as they described how they had applied prosthetic masks, donned devious disguises, and dodged deadly bullets on their journey to the southern tip of the African continent. After twenty minutes of acrobatic story-telling, they twins gave up hopelessly and fell sleepily onto the small single bed for their first rest since their heroic journey had begun 3 days prior.
Exhausted himself from his long journey from England, Lord Balah decided to have a nap himself, only to be startled back to consciousness by a loud knocking at the door. The man on the other end forcefully stepped into the room and offered to purchase the twins for R5000. Fearful and reluctant, Lord Balah politely declined the Nigerian man’s offer but promised to consider it further and get back to him in a few hours. By this time, Trudie has nestled herself quietly under the bed for safety- which is where she would sleep for the rest of their stay at the godforsaken inn in which they found themselves.
Although neither Lord Balah nor Trudie had understood the twin’s story about their escape to South Africa, they did recognize the fact that the pair had in their possession a marriage license with their names on. Familiar with the explosion of online marriages to particularly Chinese and Eastern European girls in the Boksburg area since the advent of the internet, Trudie understood that her innocent half-sisters had probably been purchased by a lonely motor-car mechanic with a wonky eye named Kobus, and quickly decided that that was no life for them.
Determined that her sisters deserved a better life than a tacky arranged marriage, Trudie decided there and then that Fei-Ying and Fei-Yang were getting a divorce from Kobus Jansen Van Rensburg just as soon as they could find the nearest place where they do divorce proceedings. Lord Balah informed her that such procedures could be performed by any government employee (he was not sure if he was correct in his assumption but was nevertheless a good improviser and indeed thoroughly convincing in his improvisations), and so Trudie without hesitation scurried down the stairs to the police officer who just a few minutes earlier had offered her R50 for a hand job and asked him to dissolve the twin’s marriage.
High on a mixture of LSD-laced marijuana and crack cocaine as Trudie approached him, the unsuspecting police officer- besieged by fear and paranoia at this sudden and unexpected appearance within his peripheral vision- quickly pulled out his gun and shot three times at the stack of papers which Trudie now stood holding out at him. And so it was that the twins’ marriage was dissolved, and they were once again single and ready to mingle amidst a cold and indifferent world, whilst somewhere in the East Rand sat a broken and unhappy man realizing that once again his heart had been broken by a woman. Two women, in fact. And it was in that moment that Kobus Jansen Van Rensburg decided that he would get his revenge…
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